Writing Quotes - Page 578

When you're just writing, you can do anything with it. But with TV, you've gotta work within certain budget constraints, so you've got to pick and choose your battles.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.

I get a lot of people who will either write to me or come up in public and say, "My daughter, son, family, or I, etc. look up to you."

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

You should be able to drink a clean cup of water and you should be able to write your own name. That's the kind of stuff that holds dear to me, not I'm the best rapper. That doesn't matter to me. At that point it's all ego to me and I don't want to be driven by that and I try my best not to.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

The [Booker] prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.

I'm not conditioned to be an entertainer. An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself. The problem with that is artists are misunderstood by all. I'm not interested in the clarinet but in music. we speak our emotions into music. An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away. My situation is the same. Let them concentrate on my music and not on me. I like the music. I love it and live it, in fact. But for me, the business part of music just plain stinks.

And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Although I didn't write myself off as a complete failure, all illusion and romance was gone. I was no longer able to inflate myself; I had disappointed my own expectations and was genuinely worried about dying in the streets.

Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.

I love producing, writing. I rarely write with other writers unless I have a real great respect for them. Like Burt Bacharach, or Carole Sager, or Stevie Wonder. Somebody like Smokey - like that. Otherwise, I choose to write alone.

When I started out in the '90s, there were not many people of color writing, directing and producing - hence, the roles for people of color were few and far between. There's still few roles in England [where she's from].

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That’s because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

I'm wishing this was something else I was writing, but, Pops, we've got to let you know we love you and know you'll always be with us.

I would write 100 jokes a day. Most of them were terrible. But I just said, 'I'll write more than everybody else, and that's how I'll get better.'

The only reason people write is because they are not wonderful men.